News

Twenty-seventeen marks the 32nd year in which we have extended the invitation to participate in the Windham Orchestra Concerto Competition. The competition is open to serious instrumental, and this year for the first time, vocal music students in grades nine through twelve who live or attend schools in the following counties:

Auditions for the competition will be held on Sunday, February 5, 2017 at the Brattleboro Music Center, 38 Walnut Street, Brattleboro, VT, 05301. Applications must be received on or before January 31, 2017.

The winner will receive $200 and an opportunity to perform with the Windham Orchestra on Thursday, March 23rd and Sunday, March 26th in Southern Vermont.

Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi

FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 7 PMSUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2 PM

The perfect activity if you are not going to the Presidential Inauguration!

One great tune after another, a superlative Vermont cast of Julie Olsson, Jenna Rae, Cailin Marcel Manson, Javier Luengo Garrido, Elizabeth Wohl, James Anderson, and from Massachusetts Ethan Bremner as Manrico. We have the great singers for one of the central operas of the repertoire: our five principals are spine-tingling in their passion and vocal power. The Windham Orchestra is playing at white heat. Vermont operating at an international level.

We can't have any burnings-at-the-stake in the Latchis Theater, but we sing about them a lot. Also mistaken identities of babies in the cradle, spookiness and obsession, warfare at the national, family and personal levels. Some form of strife for everybody, and no, there is no absurd happy ending.

The whole opera is full of highlights. Memorable above all are the arias of longing and love; Manrico racing to save his mother from the stake; Azucena the wild gypsy living her inherited traumas over and over; the sublimely sad Act IV 'Miserere'...

AND the Anvil Chorus! Audience: please bring something to produce a light metallic clashing sound so you can play along in Act II. Maybe a pair of spoons, but remember: safety first.

EMOTION. INTENSITY. CONNECTION. SHARED. SUMMIT. BEAUTY & DELIGHT.

The Windham Orchestra offers you a season of life-and-death emotion, virtuosic challenge, intellectual intensity and profound connection. We all experience music as a direct contact with these shared human phenomena and each of our concerts offers a rich and beautiful access to our own core.

In our opening concert, we experience what it is to live with the recent history of our town of Brattleboro, what it is to live in nature and the elements, what it is to be a flawed hero. Later: family drama painted very large; music that endures as a perpetual summit, no matter how frequently we scale it; purest beauty and delight.